My son (7 yrs old) is running Linux Mint 13 MATE for quite sometime and loves using it for his everyday use - Kids web sites, Tux paint, games etc....

But in past month we've been finding that when using sites running Flash the mouse will suddenly freeze and become completely unresponsive.

The keyboard and the rest of the system seems perfectly functional as I've been running a terminal session in the background which i've been able to switch to and use the keyboard, load up other apps and even as far as remove the mouse from the USB port and reconnect in a different port to no avail leaving my only course of recovery is to restart the PC.

This never happened running any other prior distro's or desktops, has anyone any ideas?

I was still experiencing the occassional freeze on the mouse in Linux Mint 13 Mate, so as my son previously used Lubuntu, stuck the 12.10 release on his PC which took about an hour (as I have the /home dir in a seperate partition making new distro's fairly easy as i have shell scripts to download the packages my son likes in another 20 mins ... Linux is just brill for this).

Since I've disconnected it, i have not had a problem at all. So I reconnected it this morning and within the hour the mouse hung. Disconnected the webcam and rebooted the pc and have been running fine since.